Tom Ryalls

He/They
Writer and Cultural Organiser

Award category:

Performing Arts, Television, Radio

I’m a writer and cultural organiser, which mainly means working on fundraising and strategy with disabled artists and disability arts organisations.

As a writer I created “The Black Hole Project”, about growing up with epilepsy. The first show in that trilogy “Can You See Into a Black Hole?” toured nationally, ran outdoors in Covent Garden, was adapted for audio, and has begun to influence the way in which young people with epilepsy receive care. This led to working with The Royal Court Theatre over the last few years to explore the history of how we tell stories about disabled people, and the dramaturgy of our writing, which will culminate this year in “The Unfinished Archive” a community-created archive reconnecting us to our storytelling history. This year my first book is also being announced, exploring the work I’ve done on creativity and ADHD.

I’ve always had a desire to change the system I was writing into as well, so after being a Head of Development and an Executive Director I founded BAP! in 2022 as a vehicle to affect wealth distribution in arts & culture, especially towards disabled communities and artists. In the last 18 months we’ve moved over £2M towards disabled-led arts, through working with organisations and providing free support to over 100 disabled artists. I’m part of the London Area Council of Arts Council England and Deputy Chair of their Disability Advisory Group and I was really proud in the last NPO refresh to support the increase in disabled-led NPOs receiving funding. I’m a trustee of Unlimited, who have awarded almost £1M to disabled artists over the last 18 months, in collaboration with a huge group of international partners.

In the book “A Monster Calls” Patrick Ness writes “Stories are wild creatures. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?”. I remember reading it as a teenager and seeing so clearly the hierarchy of whose imagination is unleashed. It motivates both my work in writing and cultural organising, as ultimately it’s all about unleashing more of the disabled imagination.

I’ve made a career out of being relatively quiet, and that has actually been really useful in terms of getting into rooms that disabled people aren’t normally invited in to. It feels so wonderful for that work to be seen on a list like this, to be connected to all these incredible people I can learn from and work with.

Q&A

Tom Ryalls
Disabled activists and advocates aren’t new, so learn from people who have been doing this a while. But, it’s also evolving quickly, so don’t be afraid to speak up for a different way of doing things too. We make more progress in solidarity than we do alone.
I’m not one for big speeches so I have generally been sneaking around in the background organising things – but I’d like to think I’ve made a big dent in resourcing disabled-led culture and disabled artists. In fundraising my organisation provides free 1-1 support to 50 disabled artists a year, training to over 200 and I’ve supported a number of disabled-led organisation to move into the mid-scale and become key parts of the cultural infrastructure. In my writing I’ve been working with The Royal Court for the last few years to look at the history of disabled writing and dramaturgy, and that work begins to become public this year. I’ve also done a lot of storytelling and creative work around epilepsy, and collaboration in this work has changed how young people with epilepsy are diagnosed, working towards epilepsy existing outside of the medical model of care. Instead of shaping culture myself, I’d like to think I’ve created the conditions for more disabled people to shape culture and the arts in the UK.
Currently in the UK we’re not great at doing wealth distribution towards disability arts practices or disabled-led arts organisations, there is a drastic under-funding of disabled people in the arts. Creativity is a place where we solve problems, interrogate society, and escape from the world to regain the energy to affect it. It’s not just that we should be able to access culture, but disabled people should be shaping and organising creativity just as much as anyone else, and this starts with resourcing us to do this. This is what I’m hoping to do with BAP! – to try and trigger this resource redistribution towards the abundance of amazing disabled people in the UK who want to shape our creativity. In my writing practice I’d love to write an episode of Dr Who about epilepsy so I’m just going to shoot my shot now and put that here too.
It doesn’t sound like switching off but I volunteer with St John Ambulance on my weekends as a cycle responder. After working a lot on long-term projects it’s nice to be able to go and do something that can instantly improve someone’s day when we’re treating people.
We rescued a dog called Mindy a few months ago, she is bringing a lot of joy to my life right now.
I have a dog (Mindy) and a cat (Cosmo) so this is like asking me to choose between my children and I absolutely can’t.
I think one of the biggest barriers to progress right now is that disabled people are only spoken about by political leaders when they’re talking about our ability to work. Society often values people in terms of the labour they provide, and this means any argument beyond the right to work is difficult to get across in a mainstream space. I’d like to see a shift in how we think about this so that we can more effectively make arguments about our right to shape society, as well as our right to work in it. It’s surprising considering how challenging it is to use “Access to Work” right now, with the amount of inefficiencies and delays in that system.
I think a lot of (not all) disabled people have quite a close relationship with health and social care, whether that be through a diagnosis, treatment, or working with carers and job aides. The system we have is unfit to support us, and I think a properly equipped care system that could enable us in a more holistic way (not solely medical treatment and tablets) would improve our quality of life drastically, and also give us more capacity to work towards an improved quality of life on a structural level.

Areas of expertise

Art, photography, Charity, social enterprise, Disability Advocacy, Equality, Gaming, Languages, Performing arts, Politics

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Image credits: Photo by Finn Daragh
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